Tag Archives: OMAFRA

As part of an OMAFRA-funded research project that examined the role of food hubs in building food system resilience in community value chains, researchers at Wilfrid Laurier’s Centre for Sustainable Food Systems conducted two province-wide surveys of local sustainable food hubs in Ontario. We surveyed food producers, processors, and distributors to find out how they defined local food, if/how they thought food hubs added value to food chains for producers and communities, where food hub funding is coming from, what kinds of expansion opportunities they could identify across the value chain, and how food hubs might increase local sales.

Our Food Hub Survey page has been updated with the latest results from the 2016 survey. We have also added a Food Hub Infographics page, where you can find these results summarized visually. The Food Hub Infographics are an excellent tool for anyone interested in learning more about food hubs in Ontario, and we invite you to share them with your networks.

Food Hub Webinar January 31, 2017

To continue the discussion about how food hubs add value to local food systems, we will host a webinar to discuss the Food Hub Survey results and infographics with panelists Alison Blay-Palmer (Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems), Katie Nolan (Agriculture and Rural Economic Development Advisor at Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs), and Phil Mount (Associate Director of Just Food). Keep your eyes on this space for the time and log-in details!

We very much hope that those who have started the survey can complete it now and those who still have not had a chance to fil it out can do so as we are closing the survey on February 17th.

Receiving data for the 2015 business year and growing season would be of tremendous benefit to our study while assisting funders and policy makers to better understand the challenges that you face. We have kept the survey open in hopes to receive much needed additional input.

For Ontario’s local and regional food producers, processors, distributors, and food service procurers: This is your chance to make your needs clear!

OMAFRA-sponsored Ontario Regional Food Hub Survey

This survey will help us to report on the current capacity of food hubs in Ontario, and recommend improvements for farmers, processors, distributors, retailers and restaurants. The ultimate goal is to help funding agencies to understand community and business needs, where funding/resource gaps exist, and how to effectively support operations such as yours. We very much appreciate the time you will take filling out the survey and hope that we can receive your input by Family Day February 17.

For technical issues or questions about filling out the survey please reply to Mike Nagy nagym@uoguelph.ca. For questions about this project, please contact Dr. Alison Blay-Palmer: ablaypalmer@wlu.ca. Thank you!

Nourishing Ontario constructed a community food toolkit, to help local food initiatives develop sustainable regional food systems. As part of an Agri-Food and Rural Link-funded project, (the knowledge translation and transfer program of the OMAF and MRA- U of G Partnership), we converted this Sustainable Communities of Food toolkit into a web-based platform, using feedback from our community and research partners on both the physical and web-based versions.

On April 4, at the OMAF and MRA- U of G Partnership Knowledge Exchange Day 2013: The KTT Toolbox, we took part in a workshop that ran through the processes involved in gathering and dealing with the feedback, and the positive changes in the digital toolkit that resulted.